October 14, 2002 Hezbollah is not merely anti-Israel but deeply, theologically anti-Jewish

October 14, 2002 Islam Says No to Jewish Homeland and State of Israel

A young Shiite scholar named Amal Saad-Ghorayeb has advanced what in Lebanon is a controversial argument: that Hezbollah is not merely anti-Israel but deeply, theologically anti-Jewish. Her new book, “Hezbollah: Politics & Religion,” dissects the anti-Jewish roots of Hezbollah ideology.  Hezbollah, she argues, believes that Jews, by the nature of Judaism, possess fatal character flaws.  …

Saad-Ghorayeb calls Israel “an aberration, a colonialist state that embraces its victimhood in order to displace another people.”  Yet her opposition to anti-Semitism seemed sincere, as when she described the anti-Jewish feeling that underlies Hezbollah’s ideology. “There is a real antipathy to Jews as Jews,” she said. “It is exacerbated by Zionism, but it existed before Zionism.”  She observed that Hezbollah, like many other Arab groups, is in the thrall of a belief system that she called “moral utilitarianism.”  Hezbollah, in other words, will find the religious justification for an act as long as the act is useful.

“For the Arabs, the end often justifies the means, even if the means are dubious,” she said.  “If it works, it’s moral.”

SHE CRITICIZES THE SCHOLAR BERNARD LEWIS FOR DOWNPLAYING THE DEPTH OF TRADITIONAL ISLAMIC ANTI-JUDAISM, ESPECIALLY WHEN COMPARED WITH CHRISTIAN ANTI-SEMITISM.

“Lewis commits the …grave error of depicting traditional Islam as more tolerant of Jews…thereby implying that Zionism was the cause of Arab-Islamic anti-Semitism,” she writes.

Saad-Ghorayeb is hesitant to label Hezbollah’s outlook anti-Semitism, however.  She prefers the term “anti-Judaism,” since in her terms anti-Semitism is a race-based hatred, while anti-Judaism is religion-based.  She quoted from a speech delivered by Hassan Nasrallah, in which he said:

“IF WE SEARCHED THE ENTIRE WORLD FOR A PERSON MORE COWARDLY, DESPICABLE, WEAK AND FEEBLE IN PSYCHE, MIND, IDEOLOGY AND RELIGION, WE WOULD NOT FIND ANYONE LIKE THE JEW.  NOTICE, I DO NOT SAY THE ISRAELI.” TO SAAD-GHORAYEB, THIS STATEMENT “PROVIDES MORAL JUSTIFICATION AND IDEOLOGICAL JUSTIFICATION FOR DEHUMANIZING THE JEWS.”  IN THIS VIEW, SHE WENT ON, “THE ISRAELI JEW BECOMES A LEGITIMATE TARGET FOR EXTERMINATION.  AND IT ALSO LEGITIMATIZES ATTACKS ON NON-ISRAELI JEWS.”

Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton State Department, once told me, “THERE’S A FUNDAMENTAL VIEW HERE OF THE JEW AS SUBHUMAN.  HEZBOLLAH IS THE DIRECT IDEOLOGICAL HEIR OF THE NAZIS.”   Saad-Ghorayeb disagrees.  Nasrallah may skirt the line between racialist anti-Semitism and theological anti-Judaism, she said, but she argued that mainstream Hezbollah ideology provides the Jews with an obvious way to repair themselves in God’s eyes: by converting to Islam.

Source: New Yorker, “In The Party of God” by Jeffrey Goldberg